A few precautions will keep your chickens safe and warm during winter.   Caring for your backyard poultry flock in winter can be especially challenging. Frigid temps, snow, and wind can all play havoc with our normal chicken care routine and with your birds’ health. Depending on your climate, winter can present some trying conditions, […]

Predators can’t be avoided, but coop doors can help. -Advertisement- If you’ve had chickens for very long, there’s a good possibility that you’ve lost at least one or two birds to a predator. Losing a favorite hen is never fun, and unfortunately sometimes the first sign of predator problems is when we lose that first […]

Mixing it up, birds of different feathers CAN flock together. Keeping a mixed flock is a thought bound to cross your mind when those spring chicks start arriving at the feed store. Maybe you have chickens and think you might like to add some ducks. Maybe you have ducks and want to expand into more […]

Make sure your chickens have clean and free water with this DIY waterer idea stolen… uh… borrowed from Frank Hyman. Water, water everywhere, but not a drop in the hen pen that’s fit to drink, because it’s often mucked up with dirt, debris, or chicken poop. Yuck! Theoretically, keeping chickens can be a lot of […]

Maat van Uitert recommends calm, friendly chicken breeds to work with kids. For children, building a relationship with a pet can help them develop language skills, provide a fun sensory experience, and encourage the stewardship of another life. Over the years, I’ve found that chickens get children excited the most. Kids know eggs are food, […]

Have you ever wanted to try raising meat chickens for your family? Learn some of the ups and downs from blogger Kaylee Vaughn’s experiences.   After several years of owning and raising chickens, we decided that it was time to try our hand at raising meat chickens. In the past, we had raised and home-butchered […]

On a whim, my husband decided to apply for a job…2400 miles from our current home. For some reason, he was shocked when the company contacted him for an interview. Suddenly, the whim went from “oh well that would be interesting” to “oh crap how are we going to move with 22 chickens, three pregnant […]

Do your chickens have names? The first of my chickens that I ever named were the original six Cornish cross meat birds we raised. As a farm kid, I’ve always known where food comes from and it didn’t bother me that we would eventually eat these chickens. So we named them Marsala, Extra Crispy, Pot […]

Laws tend to be about following rules, something that many homesteaders aren’t necessarily keen on embracing. Matt Wilkinson shares his take on existing small-scale poultry keeping and chicken processing laws and how you can make them work for you. Skeptic and Solution Finder I’ve never enjoyed being told what to do, especially if I could […]

Joel Salatin (aka Chicken Man), Author of Pastured Poultry Profits, writes about the pros and cons of U.S. government poultry processing regulations. Legislation Protecting Small-Scale Poultry Producers One of the early poultry processing laws in the U.S. was passed by Congress in 1957. The Poultry Products Inspection Act (PPIA) requires that any poultry intended to […]